skylighting
syntax highlighting library
https://github.com/jgm/skylighting
| Version on this page: | 0.7.5 |
| LTS Haskell 22.41: | 0.14.3 |
| Stackage Nightly 2024-11-12: | 0.14.3 |
| Latest on Hackage: | 0.14.3 |
skylighting-0.7.5@sha256:c050b29a98093894a449eed9c8937f0694cc5f31c26c5c91f406443b084ed61c,10143Module documentation for 0.7.5
skylighting
| Package | License | Status |
|---|---|---|
skylighting |
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skylighting-core |
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A Haskell syntax highlighting library with tokenizers derived from KDE XML syntax highlighting descriptions.
A command-line highlighter program, skylighting, is also provided.
This project is divided up into two packages:
skylighting-core: this provides KDE XML parsing, data types, and output formatters. This includes the core functionality of the skylighting project licensed under the BSD3 license, along with the KDE XML files, some of which are licensed under the LGPL or GPL. This package does not provide any built-in parsers corresponding to the XML descriptions, however. For that, useskylighting.skylighting: this exposes theskylighting-coreAPI but also provides bundled Haskell parser modules derived from the XML descriptions in thecorepackage. This package is entirely licensed under the GPL.
Motivation
This library is the successor to highlighting-kate, which had some problems that were difficult to resolve given its architecture.
In highlighting-kate, the XML syntax descriptions were converted into individual parsec parsers, which were then compiled. This made it difficult to handle IncludeRules properly without circular imports. There was also no way to load a syntax description dynamically.
Skylighting, by contrast, parses the XML syntax descriptions
into Haskell data structures, which are then interpreted by
a “tokenize” function. IncludeRules can now be handled
properly, and users can add new syntax descriptions
dynamically. It is also now possible to convert .theme files
directly into styles.
Skylighting is also faster than highlighting-kate, by a factor of 3 in some cases.
Installing
To install the latest release from Hackage, do
stack install skylighting
or
cabal install skylighting
If you want the command-line tool, set the executable flag
using --flag "skylighting:executable" in stack or
-fexecutable in cabal.
The release tarball for the skylighting package includes generated
files not present in this repository. Building from this repository is
a two-step process. In the first step we build the skylighting-core
package, which provides a program, skylighting-extract, which reads
XML syntax highlighting definitions from the xml directory and writes
Haskell source files. In the second we actually build the skylighting
package.
Using cabal:
cabal install -fexecutable
# or stack install --flag skylighting-core:executable
cd skylighting
skylighting-extract /path/to/skylighting-core/xml/*.xml
cabal install -fexecutable
# or stack install --flag skylighting:executable
Command-line tool
A command-line executable, skylighting, is installed if
the executable cabal flag is set in building.
For help, skylighting --help.
Adding new syntaxes
To compile with additional syntaxes, simply add the syntax definition
(XML) file to the xml directory of the skylighting-core package and
repeat the bootstrap build described above.
Note that both the library and the executable can dynamically load
syntax definitions, so you may not need to compile them in. If you
prefer this approach, you can use the skylighting-core package
directly which provides the XML files without the generated code
produced by the bootstrap process described above.
License
The skylighting package is licensed under the GPL because some of the
XML syntax descriptions from which its tokenizers are generated are
GPL-licensed. However, the skylighting-core package, which provides
the core types and functions of this project is licensed under the BSD3
license and bundles the GPL-licensed XML files separately.
References
Kate syntax highlighting documentation: https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/applications/katepart/highlight.html
Kate highlighting definitions: https://github.com/KDE/syntax-highlighting/tree/master/data/syntax